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Managing Practice Financial Performance
So how do you design the reports you want? Begin by defining the questions for which you need answers. For example, “What are the charges, receipt, and volume of services for the practice, by month?”
Some examples, taken from the PMRG Monthly Reports provided to clients, include:
An overview of charges, payments, and adjustments. Note the 12 months of longitudinal data:
Notice the irregular line (blue) for total charges. This pattern is not uncommon for a one- or two-physician practice. Any time spent out of the office for the physician(s) will have a magnified effect of the charge graph.
Next, notice that the payments line (green) roughly follows the charge-volumes, generally trailing by one or two months. This metric is not as sensitive to absences from the practice because the payments will continue to be received and posted even in a physician’s absence; consequently, these lines are smoother.
The Total Payments and Commissionable Payments lines represent the difference between all payments and those subject to PMRG commissions. For each client, certain payments are excluded from commission. Generally, those include optical sales, injectable drug costs, cosmetic procedures, and miscellaneous product sales.
Accounts Receivable (A/R) represents unresolved charges. When a charge is entered, the A/R increases by the amount of the charge. When a payment or adjustment is posted, the A/R decreases. When a charge is completely resolved, the A/R balance for that charge is $0.
The A/R totals are in “buckets” representing the length of time (or “age”) that the charge has been outstanding. AdvancedMD standard reporting has five A/R buckets: Current (0-30 days), 31-60, 61-90, 91-120, and 121 plus days.
Insurance AR – The ideal pattern of insurance A/R has greater than 70% of the total in the Current (0-30 days) bucket. There should be a sharp drop in the 31-60-day bucket, and further continued decreases over the succeeding buckets, with a small aggregation of balances in the 121+ bucket. The pattern noted above shows an acceptable balance pattern. It is unhealthy when the balances “march across the buckets”. That is, when there is not a decrease in the totals from 31-60, 61-90, etc.
Another important metric is the total percentage of the A/R over 90 days. It should be less than 15% of the total. In the example above, the aggregated percentage over 90 days is 8.4%, well-below the target of 15%.
The A/R balances can be skewed by any built-in delays in payment. Two common examples include an IPA that holds all Ophthalmology charges for 90 days before adjudication. This will skew the A/R. Another example is an insurance carrier that is consistently slow to pay. The Veterans Administration falls into this category, as do certain state-funded insurance programs.
This example AR table also shows a problem with patient receivables (over $192,000 over 121 days). The key to effectively managing patient balances is to maximize the collections of co-payments, deductibles, and old balances at time-of-service, thereby avoiding patient balances).
If your insurance A/R summary shows an unhealthy pattern, look at the Aging by Carrier report to see if there are one or more carriers that are outliers compared to other carriers.
This is a useful tool for monitoring the monthly history of financial transactions and can be used to help explain changes in payments. This table provides a different look than the preceding graphs. This is the first place that we look when there has been a noticeable decrease in payments. There is generally a corresponding decrease in charges.
This tabular format will not generally be available from your practice management software. Virtually all systems, however, will provide those data for one month at a time. You’ll need to build the table by adding each month’s data to the spreadsheet.
Practice Expenses – Overhead expenses are assessed using the Statement of Profit and Loss (P&L or income statement). This is an accounting statement that shows income and expenses. Expenses are parsed out into categories. The overall percentage of income, as well as the percentage of income for some of the major categories (non-provider staff cost, office occupancy, etc.).
The most valid benchmarking data for Ophthalmology are produced by the AAO’s benchmarking survey. The “N” is large enough to compare your practice to others of similar size, sub-specialty, and area of the country. We highly recommend participation in this survey.
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